Category: Gender Studies

December 17, 2018

A Video Tribute to 30 Years of Gender and the Politics of History, by Joan Wallach Scott

In October 2018, the Department of History at Simon Fraser University invited Joan Wallach Scott to give a public lecture in Vancouver, Canada. In the months leading up to the visit, Roxanne Panchasi, an Associate Professor of History at SFU...

November 29, 2018

The N-Word, Again: Bénédicte Boisseron on Afro-Dog Blackness and the Animal Question

“Dazzling in its reach and groundbreaking in its methodology, Afro-Dogredraws the contours of intellectual inquiry with dogs at the lead. Boisseron aims to rethink the hyper-legality of racism and the practice of inequality in ways that are radical and far-reaching.” ~...

September 26, 2018

China Trans Formed

“After Eunuchs deftly explores how the introduction of Western biomedicine transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body in Chinese contexts from the twentieth century onward.” ~Ari Heinrich, University of California, San Diego Today we are happy to bring you...

August 31, 2018

Book Excerpt! Virginia Woolf: A Portrait by Viviane Forrester

If you haven’t yet, enter our drawing for a chance to win a copy of this book or any of the other titles we’re featuring this week! The drawing closes today Friday, August 31 at 1:00 pm EDT. “For Woolf...

July 3, 2018

Trivia Tuesday: This Landmark Critique of Women’s History and Gender Inequality Examines the Use of Gender as a Tool for Historical and Cultural Analysis

Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History played a significant role in the movement of women from the margins of historical focus to the center in the 1980s. This collection of essays was inspired by Scott’s tenure as Director of...

April 9, 2018

Sexual Violence from the Hunger Games to Campus Rape: A Presentation at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Global Summit

Last Friday, author of  Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape, Kelly Oliver gave a compelling presentation about the implications of women and sexual violence at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Global Summit. Her presentation begins on...

April 3, 2018

Q&A: Sonja Arntzen on the The Sarashina Diary: A Woman’s Life in Eleventh-Century Japan

Gazing at this, I might think that the snow had fallen out of season, if it were not for the fragrance of this orange blossoms tree. The inclusion of poetry in all the classical Japanese diaries is perhaps what sets...

March 30, 2018

Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Search for an Adequate Witness: An Excerpt

Although their humble beginnings inspired comparison, Thomas’s upbringing was defined by paternal abandonment, and Hill’s, by a large and supportive family. Whereas Thomas is recalled as a boisterous consumer of porn and something of the “class clown” in his needling of straitlaced colleagues in...

March 29, 2018

Gender, Race, and Credibility in the Age of Trump

This narrative of individual healing, effort, and ultimate success is available primarily to white women, who have historically been constructed as precious and thus worthy of protection from hard manual labor, economic discomfort, and sexual violation (however ineffective that narrative...

March 29, 2018

Joan Wallach Scott Responds to “The Nightmare Begins”

Trump’s appeal to both men and women rested on his promise to impose a lost or threatened order of racial and gender hierarchies. The appeal was made not rationally or programmatically, but libidinally—it was the erotic call and response that...

March 28, 2018

Gender and the Politics of History: An Excerpt

It’s been 30 years since this book was first published; its endurance is a testimony to the continuing importance of gender in our political and cultural vocabulary. –Joan Wallach In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’re closing out March with one of...

March 27, 2018

Joan Wallach Scott on the Enduring Culture of Masculinity

It’s no accident that conservative forces have mounted an anti-gender campaign, determined to protect their vision of the immutable meanings of the male/female, masculine/feminine relationship. It’s not only heterosexual norms that are at stake, but a whole vision of the...